Feeding the Fishes
by Kia Vail-Kagami
Summary: Titel is missleading. Ten years old Kamui meets a strange woman :Not an OC!: when he gets lost during a schooltrip. Slightly AU concerning some events of Tokyo Babylon.


This got longer than I expected. It was planed as something little more than a drabble. It also was planned to be better than it is.

This story is slightly AU, concerning some events in TB. And it's old. I have written it only now, but I've had the idea about one year ago already. Just never felt like writing it down.

Feeding the Fishes

by Kia Vail-Kagami

"Sometimes I feel like walking into the ocean and tearing my heart out to feed it to the fishes and wait for the world to come to an end."

Kamui blinked, because that wasn't the answer he had been hoping for. He blinked at the tall young woman with colourless clothes and straight black hair that was pulled into a tight ponytail and made her look like a boy from afar. He blinked, because ha had posed a question he hadn't meant to ask for an answer he didn't understand.

Outside the sun was setting on Nagasaki – Nagasaki where he had come to with his class, Nagasaki, where he had wandered off alone, ten years full of curiosity and carelessness, Nagasaki, where he had lost his group and met this pretty woman with lips the colour of cherry blossoms and eyes like the rain forest, bright and green, and when he looked long enough he thought he even saw the water inside, like unshed tears that glittered in the light of the sun when she smiled.

He had tired very hard not to cry when he stood on the sidewalk and knew that he wouldn't find the others again. He had tried to be brave – his mother always told him to be, and he did not want to disappoint her and had hoped when he showed that he listened to her and behaved, she would show up and take him back home. He wasn't so young anymore not to know how silly he was for hoping something like that but still young enough to ignore reason and hope none the less. So he'd bit his lips and tried to be older than he was, yet the tears fell and he couldn't stop them.

Then she had found him and taken him home. She called his mother and now they waited for her to come and pick him up. She was nice, very much so, and Kamui liked her though he usually didn't like strangers. Watching her made him think of Fuma and Kotori, though she wasn't like them at all.

To pass the time, and to get his thoughts off the scolding he now, feeling safer, was sure he would get, he had started to ask her all sorts of questions, like did she live alone – yes, she did – where did she come from – Kyôto – and did she have a job already, because she looked young to him, around twenty perhaps, but it was hart to tell with woman and Kamui knew that she could have been any age between fifteen and twenty-nine.

No, she didn't have a job, she said; she lived off her family's money – the same family she wanted to avoid by moving to Nagasaki as she had told him, confusing Kamui again because he would never have moved away from the people dear to him if had had any choice – though sometimes she'd create clothes for friends and relatives that weren't too conservative for her tastes. This she'd added with a laugh and a wink, and the boy then noticed that her dress, though plain at first sight was rather unusual and perhaps a little bit like what his mother's friends called eccentric. It looked very good, he had told her and she's laughed and said Of course it does, and he'd wondered what was wrong then because her laughter had sounded too much like his mother's when they joked about the future.

Ten years old, Kamui knew nothing of unshed tears. He didn't understand how someone could look so sad without looking sad at all.

Finally he asked her the question his mother had only recently asked him and neither did he understand her then nor did he understand why he posed it now. Maybe it was to chase away the uncomfortable feeling her laughter had left him with, maybe he had hoped it would help him understand its meaning, for when it had been posed to him he'd though it sounded important and he still didn't know why. Perhaps it was fate, he thought years later, when he finally understood the meaning and all he could think of what the man behind the camera.

When his mother had asked him if there was anything that made the world worth existing for him he said there was, Fuma and Kotori, his childhood friend he hadn't seen or heard from for so long, and she had seemed satisfied. When he posed this question to the stranger he had met in the streets of Nagasaki she spoke of feeding the fishes with her heart and the end of the world, and he didn't understand. He wanted to know but one look into her face that was turned to the window and watched the world move on behind the glass told him that sometimes it was better not to ask.

Trying not to show how much he suddenly wished his mother would arrive soon he started to wander through the living room, faking interest for the furniture only so he would not have to look at her. Noticing his looking around she said, as if in need to apologize, that she had only just moved in. Kamui saw what she meant, when he looked closer. The apartment looked tasteful, clean and modern but not quite… finished, he though. Something was missing here and the colourful paintings and cloths she'd decorated the place with didn't quite succeed in filling the empty spaces on the wall.

Finally he found something to rest his eyes on. There were some framed photos standing on the high-board beside the couch for him to study – a portrait photo of an old woman, a long haired, foreign looking girl with a pretty smile, something that looked like a memory-shot of a school group. Behind this one and almost hidden from view stood a picture that showed a teen-aged girl Kamui recognized as the nice young woman herself – she had introduced herself right after she found him but he had forgotten her name and was too ashamed to admit it and ask again. In the picture she was standing in front of a glittering sea Kamui recognized as the water of Tôkyô-Bay thanks to the Rainbow Bridge that could be seen in the background. Beside her stood another girl, dressed in a green and black dress that seemed wired even to him. Their faces were totally identical, which fascinated the boy, and they were smiling openly at whoever was taking the photo. They looked happy.

"Is this your sister?", he asked in his high child-voice when the silence became too uncomfortable to bear, pointing at the girl in the wired dress. It was a stupid question to ask, he knew, since it was pretty obvious, but it was all he could think of.

To his surprise she laughed. "No," she said, "that's me. I dressed like that a lot at that time. The one beside me is my little brother. My twin."

"Oh." Kamui felt himself blushing and stuttered an apology. She laughed even more.

"Don't worry. Even the people that knew us for years couldn't tell who's who if we didn't want them to." Her smile grew a little wistful. "Being a twin can be so much fun. Sadly he wasn't the kind of child that would fool around."

"Ah." The little boy smiled as well, relieved that she wasn't angry at him for confusing her brother with a girl and her with a boy. "Has he also moved to Nagasaki?" he wanted to know. She had told him she wanted some distance to the rest of her family but he could not imagine this included her twin. They looked so close in that picture, even though they weren't standing that close to each other at all. Funny, he though.

"No," she said, her voice devoid of anything. "He's dead." Kamui fell silent.

"I'm sorry," he then said because he had learned that this was what people said at times like this. But she shook her head, and smiled, once more. "No. I am." Lips like cherry blossoms, he thought again, but they were getting redder now, for she was biting them.

Before he could stop himself – he knew it was something you just didn't ask – the words had left his mouth. "What happened? And accident?"

She laughed again, but it was a hoarse sound, harsh and painful. He should not have asked.

"And accident? No, it was a mistake. We were just stupid. I wish I could say that we have been blind."

Kamui stared at her, confused. He said nothing; he didn't have to. After a few seconds she sighed and said in a voice that contained no emotion at all: "He was murdered."

"By whom?" Kamui wanted to know, shocked, and she looked though the boy and the photo behind him, though time and space to another world he did not know and had no part in.

"A friend," she said. "He was the one who took this picture."

"But you look so happy there!"

"We were." There was silence. Kamui looked at her, turning away from the picture, and felt nothing but his heart beating in his chest and two pairs of green eyes in his back, full of joy and trust, looking at a man eternally hidden from view. Then she whispered something and he had to strain his ears to make out the words she said to everyone who wasn't here.

"We loved him."

Violet eyes filled with tears. "Why? When he was your friend, why did he do it? I don't understand!"

The woman closed her eyes, her lips twisted into the cruel parody of a smile. "I know why he killed him," she said in a normal voice that scared Kamui more than anything. "I don't understand why he was our friend."

At a loss for words and without a chance of changing the toping nor wanting to, the boy asked the only question that came to his mind: "Did he get arrested?"

Another harsh laugh, bitter. "No."

Another thing Kamui didn't understand, since they knew he'd done it.

"Aren't you scared that he will kill you too?" he wanted to know and finally she returned to this place, this time, a large apartment in the outer city of Nagasaki, in the third month of 1994. Her smile broke his heart. He wondered if she was still capable of smiling like she had when the photo was taken. He wished he hadn't forgotten her name.

"There is not reason to be scared of dying. I only wish I could kill him first."

Kamui thought about this. "But," he said. "If dying isn't bad, why would killing him make any sense?"

"Ah, you are a smart boy", she laughed, and it seemed honest this time again though he knew it wasn't. "Because I imagine that he would like to live for a little longer."

"Don't you?" Kamui looked at her through wide eyes and the with the view of a child. And she said to him:

"When you lose the people you loved more than anything, the world is just another place without them."

Kamui remembered Fuma and Kotori, and he though that this at least, maybe, he understood.

Suddenly she got up from the couch and went to the kitchen to get a something to drink. He could hear the sound of running water and through the open window he heard the noise of cars going by. The sun was almost gone.

"My brother was the nicest person ever." The woman was wearing her original open smile again when she returned to the living room. "You would have liked him."

Kamui looked at the photo one last time, looked at the boy with the large, expressive eyes and the pretty face and thought that yes, probably, he would have.

And still he was glad when the doorbell rang and his mother came in to hug him and scold him, then hug him again. She talked to the young woman for a few minutes before she took him back home and only when he lay in his bed that night, in another city and another world, he realised that he might have found out that woman's name if only he had paid more attention to her talking to his mother.

Outside, the stars disappeared when the sky got covered by clouds and it started to rain.

In the years that followed he often asked himself weather or not this world was a place worth protecting. Later, he asked himself if mankind deserved to live on. He thought of his friends then and the answer was Yes. As long as there were people like them it was worth anything, anything, to be saved. When he though of the woman he met in Nagasaki as a child however, when he thought of the happy twins in the picture and the man who'd taken it, he wasn't so sure.

And that night, after he came home and went to sleep; that night, while the rain was falling steadily though the darkness, he dreamed of going into the ocean and feeding his heart to the fished and waiting for the world to come to an end.

-end-

October 2th, 2005

This picture has nothing to do with the story, but when I described the photo I had to think of it and thought that maybe it was taken the same day. So have a look: www. deviantart . com/ view /8945375/

It is quite old already, and I think it would look very different (and better, I hope) if I drew it again now, but, well, I won't. /sigh/

Well, the circumstances resulting in Subaru's death where a little different than Hokuto presented them here. Seishiro didn't even directly kill him. She simply told the Short-and-suitable-for-ten-year-olds version of their story.

Actually, this is only the prologue to a longer story I once thought of, in which Kamui chooses to become a Dragon of Earth and evil, Fuma becomes a Seal and remains nice, Kazuki hasn't died (which means no Nataku), and so on. It's focusing mainly on the TB-charas, and I mean all three of them. (There is no problem a fanfic-author can't solve, not even the ones they caused themselves. ) But it will probably never get written, so just see this as a one-shot.

And if you read this, pleas review!


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